This is nothing less than fraud. When you advertise something to be true, you _have_ to make sure it's true! You can't go around saying your snake oil will cure everything from arthritis to cancer, and you shouldn't be able to say "our stuff is compatible with linux" when it isn't, and you refuse to support it. Talk to your Better Business Bureau and see what you can do about getting your Truth in Advertising agency to breathe down their necks. You'll get their support or their Tux sticker, one way or another.;) ---
My favorite part is that this is a 'grassroots effort' but it has a Redmond address. One can only speculate.
Don't bother speculating. The brocure can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnov ate/. The address pretty much says it all. After all, it's a grass-roots effort, and Microsoft donated web space to them out of the kindness of their own hearts, and so that they wouldn't have to be bothered with the $75 US fee for a domain name.
Oh, by the way, check out the copyright and "terms of use" on the 'how to get involved' page. It's even funnier than the brochure.
I suppose that lots of people are going to be stupid and/or gullible enough to believe this blatant piece of shit; after all, the Good Times virus worked, didn't it?
Gotta love that Microsoft - resorting to outright lies and misinformation.
No, they don't _resort_ to outright lies and misinformation. They use it on a regular basis, a choice out of many weapons in their arsenal, including FUD, intimidation, threats, backstabbing, and probably a bunch more that I either haven't heard of yet, or can't remember. (there sure are a lot of them!)
It shouldn't come as _any_ surprise that they're truly evil. ---
Or maybe it's because getting your hands dirty pulling wrenches is MANLY. As a result, women are discouraged from doing it by men who are threatened by their presence and other women who find it repulsive that a woman would want to.
This is an attitude, or perhaps a genetic trait that goes back literally thousands of years. Men are the ones who have traditionally done the dirty work; farming, hunting, fishing, butchering, mechanics, carpentry, war, and anything involving heavy labour. Women have done tons of work nonetheless, but it's traditionally been restricted to less messy jobs like cooking, cleaning, interior decorating, secretarial work and nursing. For all this time, these jobs have been categorized as either masculine or feminine.
Men interested in feminine work and women interested in masculine work have been discouraged from doing so not only from traditionalists (or bigots... either way, the results are the same) who have openly laughed at them, but from their socialization that has raised them to believe that doing certain things make one less masculine or feminine.
The point here isn't that men and women should stick to the jobs that are allowed by their gender, but instead that everyone should be allowed to do whatever the hell they feel like without people openly laughing at them - especially the people who are supposed to be teaching them how to do it in the first place. Girls only make bad CS students when the teachers aren't doing a good job.
Computer science is a pretty open field right now. It's still too new to have truly settled into a defined gender role and most of society still shuns _anyone_ who tries to pursue it. We have the ability right now to make it into a gender-neutral role. It's certainly not as manly a job as mechanics or boxing, and it's not as feminine a job as nursing or interior decorating. Computer science has also had as many great female pioneers as it has had men, yet many mediocre male CS teachers are being snooty about female students, and the overwhelming male majority of the classes aren't helping any either. ---
Pedestal or grave? A whole new can of worms.
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Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
Well, Katz has one possible outcome in mind, where the world will be ruled by smart, beautiful people who all conform to some lauded ideal, and dissent and non-conformity are bred out. Not unlike the movie Gattaca. But there's also a different outcome. One that makes a fair bit more sense, especially from _his_ viewpoint that the smart people are hated by the vast majority. Those of us who have read Heinlein - especially "Friday" - probably already know what I'm talking about. Imagine what a child that's been genetically engineered for perfection would be like... with an IQ of 180 or so, well-versed in science, mathematics, music, yadda yadda. And just for fun, throw in the ability to think faster than everyone else, with rattlesnake reflexes and the strength of an ox. (the assumption being that the child be male just for arguments' sake.) Will this child live a life of extraordinary acheivement, famous for his intellect, or will he grow up lonely, ridiculed and shunned by the rest of the world? He has the opportunity to be anything he wants... a scientist, a poet, an author, a musician, an artist, an athlete, or all of the above. But people being what they are, and society being what it is, he will invariably be unpopular and probably even hated by most everyone. As an athlete, coaches would love him but even teammates would probably at least be jealous and not invite him over to after-game parties, or probably hate him outright for not having to work at what everyone else has to sweat blood for. As an artist of one sort or another, well society just will not understand him - he'll be that wierdo in the corner with his poetry and his paint. I couldn't tell you what would happen to him as a businessman... I don't understand them at all myself.;) And as a great scientist he would grow up as we all know best... as the nerdy sort that most people despise and revile. Although he has the strength to defend himself, he has the wisdom and intelligence not to want to, making everyone else think he's a wimp for not beating the crap out of some dimwit with more brawn than brain who's always on his case. In light of this, attempts to make people "perfect" through genetic engineering will probably either go the way of the dodo after a generation or two, or a new definition of genetic perfection will evolve - mediocrity. In the latter case though, I think that most people will see the less expensive solution and not bother, as mediocre kids are born naturally every day. In my own opinion, I think that people who are genetically engineered are going to be the ones that are looked upon as unnatural freaks and marginalized by society, to be told to sit at the back of the bus, should they ever have the audacity to use public transportation. The goverment would probably make it mandatory for them to be tattooed at birth "for the protection of society." After all, this is dangerous new technology that must be controlled, regulated and approved by the goverment. ---
Heh. It's an interesting take on the situation. The Nazi regime probably wouldn't have bothered exterminating the Jews then... they would have instead had their scientists breed Judiasm out of the population. (Without genetic engineering such as this, the only "solution" to their "problem" was extermination, which even to them wasn't exactly an elegant solution.)
I also think it's possible that anyone with a good enough grasp of the latest kernel and how it works is more than likely writing code rather than writing docs.
Actually, I suspect he means code documentation. Meaning comments. So that when you go through the code for reasons of understanding, or debugging, or whatever, then you have a clear understanding of what's going on.
And IMHO, anyone who writes code (complex or not, but _especially_ complex) and doesn't document it should be summarily beaten with a wet noodle and sentenced to doing technical support.:) Anyone who does this for open source should get double the punishment, because god knows who's going to need or read this documentation or for what nefarious purposes. It's all hanging out, with a thousand eyeballs peering at it, and it needs to be crystal clear. ---
Yes but you dont need to induce the power into the enginge. Mess up the controls and you could get a freghttrain to run amok. It has been done with planes ( cellphones, you know the rest ) Perhaps you should enlighten us? How exactly _did_ such a low-power radio such as a cell phone mess up the _controls_ of an aircraft? No, you are horribly and woefully misinformed. (or you completely lack understanding in this area, in which case you shouldn't say anything) What happens with cell phones and aircraft has nothing to do with the controls, but the navigational equipment that recieves radio signals. Since these devices are likely to overlap in the frequencies they use, it's not such a huge leap of logic as to why such navigational equipment might not be very accurate under these circumstances. It's also worth noting that freight trains do not need radio navigation equipment to find their way. You shouldent underestimate the strangeness of things that can happen when dealing with HFEM radiation. Riiiiiiight. Seen any funny lights in the sky lately? ---
Wow. There sure are a lot of moderators who moonlight as conspiracy theorists. 4:Interesting? More like 0:Flamebait.
This guy needs a reality check. The only place in the universe that one is safe from those darn Electromagnetic Radiations is deep underground. (And where it's very cold indeed... heat is of course a form of EM radiation.) Except for all those damn neutrinos that might accidentally pass through a cell or two of course, breaking his DNA someplace funny and causing cancer. Even without human intervention, we're constantly being blasted with EM radiation from places like the Sun, the Milky Way, and about a billion billion other stars and galaxies.
I just love environmentalist twits who think they're smart by talking about something they clearly know less than nothing about. It seems the only thing that gets them out of bed in the morning (for fear of all the things that are hazardous to their health) is the idea that they can make the world so much safer by getting the government to pass laws against sunshine. ---
The average mum and dad user does not want customization to that level. Most of them don't even want to change the colors of their windows titlebars.
So Themes.org _doesn't_ get a million hits a day, right? Hell, if I showed my parents Windowblinds, they'd jump at it in a second. ---
Re:Starting a real campaign
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Copyrant
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· Score: 1
And here's another way to help: Not all computer users may use the internet, (although the majority do... it's a reason to buy a computer in and of itself) but all of them buy computer software. And hardware. Picket outside your local software/hardware retail store and hand out fliers. Get them informed and get them to write or e-mail their local government representative. Try to get other people to do the same around the city. With enough people doing this, (and/or a press release) you're bound to get media attention. ---
Re:it is our fault heres why...
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Copyrant
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· Score: 1
f I were American, I would. Can't be any worse than the current choices:)
Do you live in a democracy? Write your representative, regardless of what his title is, and bitch. Get other people to do the same. It's that simple. You might not get the law changed in the US, but it might get it changed in your country, which is what matters to you. I'm going to do the same, and I live in Canada. ---
Let's face it, "stop [big corporation] from [doing evil thing]" just doesn't spread as well in a crowd and individual companies don't make nearly as enticing targets as a single big "corporatist" organization.
Most slashdotters will say there is replacement software out there.. and then forget the most important part of the desktop: the user.
Yes, it's official: The average user doesn't know how to use linux. This is your single, biggest challenge.
This is not the problem. There's lots of good GUIs for unix. You can even make X look like windows 95. Most users won't need to know anything they don't already know about Windows, just double-click the icon for the program they use and away they go.
Which brings me to another point, which is about the fallacy that "users just log in, do their work and log out." What happens with windows machines at least twice a week (and often at least once daily) is that the user logs in, tries to do their work until windows crashes, then they spend another five minutes doing nothing while windows reboots, scans the drive and makes a lame attempt at recovering the data that they were working on at the time. With a unix workstation, the user logs in in the morning, does their work and logs out at 5:00. And it will continue to do so under such light loads for many months. When something breaks, half the time you just telnet in and fix it for them while you talk to them on the phone - something that's much more difficult to do with windows 98 - and which makes getting rid of that evil vi paperclip that much easier.;)
Heh. Sure, you could build computer cases that will go through hell, high water and beuracracy, but WHY? Who the hell wants a 10 year old 386 for anything besides a museum display or a doorstop? The electronics might not degrade through use, but you'll have something far better, faster and cheaper before the 3-year warranty runs out.
The other thing that strikes me as strange, is that there wasn't really a big protest about this database, it was simply people asking to see their data which caused them to shut it down. Why does the government not want the people to know what the government knows about them? That is the thing that scares me.
Wow, we really know a lot about Canada, now don't we? That it strikes you as strange that there wasn't a big protest is pretty much proof that you're American.;) It was in fact, a government official - the privacy commisioner - that brought it to the attention of the media and the citizens. And apparently she only did this after badgering the HRDC chief for three months to change things. Of course, the HRDC jumped right to the job once the media was informed - it's only been about a week since this whole thing came out, and that's breakneck speed for any beuracracy anywhere to do anything for anyone.
And dismantling the database is probably just one of the things she's talking about. The HRDC really does see the need for protecting the privacy of the populace, and this is nothing new. They have been paranoid about giving information away to anyone for years now, (for as long as I've been part of the work force, that's for sure) to the extent that they don't even trust other government agencies, like our Taxation agency, or our Social Welfare agency, or the Worker's Compensation Board, and the list goes on. For the HRDC to share any information with any of them, they need your permission in writing before they give them the information they need. ---
I like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, but Episode 1 was pretty lame in comparison. (and you have to make that comparison) I like Blade Runner. I like Dangerous Liasons. I like The Sheltering Sky. I like The Matrix, The Hunt For Red October (and I like the book much better) and Impact and a hundred more.
However, I would never, ever watch this movie or a lot of other movies like it. This is because I don't like movies with plots that insult my intelligence. Hell, I know people who _like_ dumb movies that hate this one because it was dumb. Movies like this are for people who have been lobotomized and find flashing lights endlessly entertaining.
Quite frankly, with few exceptions Hollywood hasn't had very many good writers for the past few years. This is why we keep seeing remakes of old movies and old stories. In many cases, these are _remakes_ of remakes. (I haven't seen Cruel Intentions because I've seen it before - it was called "Dangerous Liasons," which was a remake of an old French play.) And when you see competing movies with the same plot concept, (Impact and Armageddon being perfect examples) and one of the screenplays was obviously hastily written, it's pretty clear that some studios pay their corporate spies more than they pay their writers.
So yeah, I like movies. I even like a lot of movies. But there's a whole hell of a lot more movies that I despise. Thankfully, I can usually tell from the trailer those that are good and those that really stink. And it looks like I was right about this one. ---
And this doesn't even need to be a real, cryptographically random codebook. It could be Webster's dictionary, any phone book, "Programming Perl," (god forbid) or "The Catcher in the Rye" (any edition). The method used here would be to quote a page number, which would correspond to the first (or any other previously-agreed upon) word on that page. Another fringe benefit of this method is that having a copy of "The Stand" doesn't necessarily mean you are a spy, while having a cryptographically random codebook would be awfully hard to explain.
The task of being _able_ to search the entire world's printed matter (in each particular edition) for the past thousand years or so is in itself a massive undertaking. To be able to use such a database in a meaningful way would also be very very difficult.
But if we pull it off, I suppose we've just done a great deal of good for the Library of Congress, have we not?;) ---
Actually, I think I would like to be first in line to break the kneecaps of anyone stupid enough to start spamming me via pager/cellphone/pda. Isn't it bad enough to _have_ these appliances, and have them interrupt you at the worst time? Aren't telemarketers bad enough? I'm beginning to think that the Internet-plug-in-the-back-of-the-head idea is a bad one... imagine being CONSTANTLY bombarded with advertising while you're trying to think... ---
but I think they're also pissed because they might make less money
Heh. Perhaps you just skipped right over the interview and posted without reading? This guy isn't pissed off because he might make less money. He's not too terribly concerned with making more money than he already does. (personally, if I were such an artist and had more money than I needed, I would focus on my art, because I don't _need_ to focus on making my rent.) He's pissed off because noone _asked_ him if he wanted to distribute his music on Napster. I know a number of erotic writers who really get pissed off when their stuff shows up on a porn site that charges money for their stuff. These writers aren't making _any_ money off of it, and they don't want to. They publish their stuff with the expressed intention that it be FREELY AVAILABLE. However, entirely too many people are willing to say "Hey, it's on the Internet, so it must be public domain, so I can start charging people money for it."
Don't deny that this attitude exists, because it's so rampant it's not funny. And Napster is most definitely making money off of this. And they expect to make a profit too, or you wouldn't see VC's pouring millions of dollars on them. If Napster had asked Metallica if they wanted their stuff to be distributed in this way, Metallica just might have agreed. But people didn't ask, they just started raping them.
And I also think it's funny the way people think about the music industry. If a guy in the Real World got a job doing the thing he really loved, people would look at him and say "hey, there's a really successful/lucky guy." But when a musician starts making money doing the thing he really loves instead of barely existing on a job at a fast-food joint, (or worse, struggling to make rent on the club circuit - most everyone would be really tempted to do "whatever it takes" under those circumstances.) then he's sold out to The Man and doesn't deserve the time of day. Gimme a break man. ---
Heh. Um... I think the point is that no, it's not a secret. They're giving away the information to whoever asks, but they whine and bitch when people have access to it when they didn't ask.
Apparently, the probability of a secret getting out is the square of the number of people who know that secret, no matter what kind of threats are hung over the heads of those trusted with that secret. This applies at such places as the CIA in the US, where secrets are very important and the consequences of giving them away are very nasty indeed. Why does Microsoft expect to keep this a secret when literally millions of people have easy access to it, most of whom have absolutely no reason whatsoever to not give it away (including contractual obligation, because the contract does not apply in their jurisdiction, or because they are underage)? It would appear to me that the only reason they even have the contract in the first place is so they can go around and bully lots of people in the open source movement.
Well, whatever. As Jack Webster once said, "Go ahead and sue me. I need the publicity!" Slashdot has certainly got a lot of that out of this. ---
can't really say that I trust Canadian government department employees' professionalism: Fishing for smut
You mean besides getting fired? (The most feared penalty of social servants.) Try to get the HRDC to send information about you to government agency X someday.
"Please sign this consent form here, and this other form here, and present three pieces of ID, one of which has to be a driver's license, passport, or other picture ID."
If she doesn't make you go through this, consider getting her fired, as she's not doing her job. My impression from the HRDC is that they take your privacy seriously in this and many other ways. (For instance they mask all but the last three numbers of your social insurance number on any documentation they have.) ---
Third, this is a PR nightmare for Microsoft. They've already gotten reamed in the press for not releasing Kerberos specs, now they're insisting those specs are a Trade Secret?
Heh. It comes to me as a surprise that Microsoft cares about PR.They clearly do not. You would think that they believe the trial the DOJ has brought against them is a big PR nightmare, where they'd be losing customers left right and center, and that in order to avoid this, they would be scrambling to fix what they've been accused of doing wrong. You know, kind of like what IBM did when they were put under pressure from the DOJ for pretty much the same thing in the early 80's.
The problem is that we already know that about 60% of their customers hate them and would prefer never to do business with them again, if they had the choice. Microsoft knows this, and only sees the next two years or so of litigation by the DOJ as a ripe opportunity to rape their customers and "business partners" several more times, mocking the law as the gears of justice grind slowly to a decision against an industry where two years is longer than some of the most successful businesses are alive. ---
Slashdot Mirror
This is nothing less than fraud. When you advertise something to be true, you _have_ to make sure it's true! You can't go around saying your snake oil will cure everything from arthritis to cancer, and you shouldn't be able to say "our stuff is compatible with linux" when it isn't, and you refuse to support it. Talk to your Better Business Bureau and see what you can do about getting your Truth in Advertising agency to breathe down their necks. You'll get their support or their Tux sticker, one way or another. ;)
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Don't bother speculating. The brocure can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnov ate/. The address pretty much says it all. After all, it's a grass-roots effort, and Microsoft donated web space to them out of the kindness of their own hearts, and so that they wouldn't have to be bothered with the $75 US fee for a domain name.
Oh, by the way, check out the copyright and "terms of use" on the 'how to get involved' page. It's even funnier than the brochure.
I suppose that lots of people are going to be stupid and/or gullible enough to believe this blatant piece of shit; after all, the Good Times virus worked, didn't it?
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No, they don't _resort_ to outright lies and misinformation. They use it on a regular basis, a choice out of many weapons in their arsenal, including FUD, intimidation, threats, backstabbing, and probably a bunch more that I either haven't heard of yet, or can't remember. (there sure are a lot of them!)
It shouldn't come as _any_ surprise that they're truly evil.
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This is an attitude, or perhaps a genetic trait that goes back literally thousands of years. Men are the ones who have traditionally done the dirty work; farming, hunting, fishing, butchering, mechanics, carpentry, war, and anything involving heavy labour. Women have done tons of work nonetheless, but it's traditionally been restricted to less messy jobs like cooking, cleaning, interior decorating, secretarial work and nursing. For all this time, these jobs have been categorized as either masculine or feminine.
Men interested in feminine work and women interested in masculine work have been discouraged from doing so not only from traditionalists (or bigots... either way, the results are the same) who have openly laughed at them, but from their socialization that has raised them to believe that doing certain things make one less masculine or feminine.
The point here isn't that men and women should stick to the jobs that are allowed by their gender, but instead that everyone should be allowed to do whatever the hell they feel like without people openly laughing at them - especially the people who are supposed to be teaching them how to do it in the first place. Girls only make bad CS students when the teachers aren't doing a good job.
Computer science is a pretty open field right now. It's still too new to have truly settled into a defined gender role and most of society still shuns _anyone_ who tries to pursue it. We have the ability right now to make it into a gender-neutral role. It's certainly not as manly a job as mechanics or boxing, and it's not as feminine a job as nursing or interior decorating. Computer science has also had as many great female pioneers as it has had men, yet many mediocre male CS teachers are being snooty about female students, and the overwhelming male majority of the classes aren't helping any either.
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Well, Katz has one possible outcome in mind, where the world will be ruled by smart, beautiful people who all conform to some lauded ideal, and dissent and non-conformity are bred out. Not unlike the movie Gattaca. But there's also a different outcome. One that makes a fair bit more sense, especially from _his_ viewpoint that the smart people are hated by the vast majority. Those of us who have read Heinlein - especially "Friday" - probably already know what I'm talking about. Imagine what a child that's been genetically engineered for perfection would be like... with an IQ of 180 or so, well-versed in science, mathematics, music, yadda yadda. And just for fun, throw in the ability to think faster than everyone else, with rattlesnake reflexes and the strength of an ox. (the assumption being that the child be male just for arguments' sake.) Will this child live a life of extraordinary acheivement, famous for his intellect, or will he grow up lonely, ridiculed and shunned by the rest of the world? He has the opportunity to be anything he wants... a scientist, a poet, an author, a musician, an artist, an athlete, or all of the above. But people being what they are, and society being what it is, he will invariably be unpopular and probably even hated by most everyone. As an athlete, coaches would love him but even teammates would probably at least be jealous and not invite him over to after-game parties, or probably hate him outright for not having to work at what everyone else has to sweat blood for. As an artist of one sort or another, well society just will not understand him - he'll be that wierdo in the corner with his poetry and his paint. I couldn't tell you what would happen to him as a businessman... I don't understand them at all myself. ;) And as a great scientist he would grow up as we all know best... as the nerdy sort that most people despise and revile. Although he has the strength to defend himself, he has the wisdom and intelligence not to want to, making everyone else think he's a wimp for not beating the crap out of some dimwit with more brawn than brain who's always on his case. In light of this, attempts to make people "perfect" through genetic engineering will probably either go the way of the dodo after a generation or two, or a new definition of genetic perfection will evolve - mediocrity. In the latter case though, I think that most people will see the less expensive solution and not bother, as mediocre kids are born naturally every day. In my own opinion, I think that people who are genetically engineered are going to be the ones that are looked upon as unnatural freaks and marginalized by society, to be told to sit at the back of the bus, should they ever have the audacity to use public transportation. The goverment would probably make it mandatory for them to be tattooed at birth "for the protection of society." After all, this is dangerous new technology that must be controlled, regulated and approved by the goverment.
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Heh. It's an interesting take on the situation. The Nazi regime probably wouldn't have bothered exterminating the Jews then... they would have instead had their scientists breed Judiasm out of the population. (Without genetic engineering such as this, the only "solution" to their "problem" was extermination, which even to them wasn't exactly an elegant solution.)
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Actually, I suspect he means code documentation. Meaning comments. So that when you go through the code for reasons of understanding, or debugging, or whatever, then you have a clear understanding of what's going on.
And IMHO, anyone who writes code (complex or not, but _especially_ complex) and doesn't document it should be summarily beaten with a wet noodle and sentenced to doing technical support. :) Anyone who does this for open source should get double the punishment, because god knows who's going to need or read this documentation or for what nefarious purposes. It's all hanging out, with a thousand eyeballs peering at it, and it needs to be crystal clear.
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Sure. If your nervous system were made out of copper wire... Is it?
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Yes but you dont need to induce the power into the enginge. Mess up the controls and you could get a freghttrain to run amok. It has been done with planes ( cellphones, you know the rest ) Perhaps you should enlighten us? How exactly _did_ such a low-power radio such as a cell phone mess up the _controls_ of an aircraft? No, you are horribly and woefully misinformed. (or you completely lack understanding in this area, in which case you shouldn't say anything) What happens with cell phones and aircraft has nothing to do with the controls, but the navigational equipment that recieves radio signals. Since these devices are likely to overlap in the frequencies they use, it's not such a huge leap of logic as to why such navigational equipment might not be very accurate under these circumstances. It's also worth noting that freight trains do not need radio navigation equipment to find their way. You shouldent underestimate the strangeness of things that can happen when dealing with HFEM radiation. Riiiiiiight. Seen any funny lights in the sky lately?
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Wow. There sure are a lot of moderators who moonlight as conspiracy theorists. 4:Interesting? More like 0:Flamebait.
This guy needs a reality check. The only place in the universe that one is safe from those darn Electromagnetic Radiations is deep underground. (And where it's very cold indeed... heat is of course a form of EM radiation.) Except for all those damn neutrinos that might accidentally pass through a cell or two of course, breaking his DNA someplace funny and causing cancer. Even without human intervention, we're constantly being blasted with EM radiation from places like the Sun, the Milky Way, and about a billion billion other stars and galaxies.
I just love environmentalist twits who think they're smart by talking about something they clearly know less than nothing about. It seems the only thing that gets them out of bed in the morning (for fear of all the things that are hazardous to their health) is the idea that they can make the world so much safer by getting the government to pass laws against sunshine.
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So Themes.org _doesn't_ get a million hits a day, right? Hell, if I showed my parents Windowblinds, they'd jump at it in a second.
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And here's another way to help: Not all computer users may use the internet, (although the majority do... it's a reason to buy a computer in and of itself) but all of them buy computer software. And hardware. Picket outside your local software/hardware retail store and hand out fliers. Get them informed and get them to write or e-mail their local government representative. Try to get other people to do the same around the city. With enough people doing this, (and/or a press release) you're bound to get media attention.
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Do you live in a democracy? Write your representative, regardless of what his title is, and bitch. Get other people to do the same. It's that simple. You might not get the law changed in the US, but it might get it changed in your country, which is what matters to you. I'm going to do the same, and I live in Canada.
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You mean like Microsoft? ;)
Q.E.D.
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Yes, it's official: The average user doesn't know how to use linux. This is your single, biggest challenge.
This is not the problem. There's lots of good GUIs for unix. You can even make X look like windows 95. Most users won't need to know anything they don't already know about Windows, just double-click the icon for the program they use and away they go.
Which brings me to another point, which is about the fallacy that "users just log in, do their work and log out." What happens with windows machines at least twice a week (and often at least once daily) is that the user logs in, tries to do their work until windows crashes, then they spend another five minutes doing nothing while windows reboots, scans the drive and makes a lame attempt at recovering the data that they were working on at the time. With a unix workstation, the user logs in in the morning, does their work and logs out at 5:00. And it will continue to do so under such light loads for many months. When something breaks, half the time you just telnet in and fix it for them while you talk to them on the phone - something that's much more difficult to do with windows 98 - and which makes getting rid of that evil vi paperclip that much easier. ;)
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Heh. Sure, you could build computer cases that will go through hell, high water and beuracracy, but WHY? Who the hell wants a 10 year old 386 for anything besides a museum display or a doorstop? The electronics might not degrade through use, but you'll have something far better, faster and cheaper before the 3-year warranty runs out.
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Wow, we really know a lot about Canada, now don't we? That it strikes you as strange that there wasn't a big protest is pretty much proof that you're American. ;) It was in fact, a government official - the privacy commisioner - that brought it to the attention of the media and the citizens. And apparently she only did this after badgering the HRDC chief for three months to change things. Of course, the HRDC jumped right to the job once the media was informed - it's only been about a week since this whole thing came out, and that's breakneck speed for any beuracracy anywhere to do anything for anyone.
And dismantling the database is probably just one of the things she's talking about. The HRDC really does see the need for protecting the privacy of the populace, and this is nothing new. They have been paranoid about giving information away to anyone for years now, (for as long as I've been part of the work force, that's for sure) to the extent that they don't even trust other government agencies, like our Taxation agency, or our Social Welfare agency, or the Worker's Compensation Board, and the list goes on. For the HRDC to share any information with any of them, they need your permission in writing before they give them the information they need.
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Heh. Yes, we actually like movies.
I like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, but Episode 1 was pretty lame in comparison. (and you have to make that comparison) I like Blade Runner. I like Dangerous Liasons. I like The Sheltering Sky. I like The Matrix, The Hunt For Red October (and I like the book much better) and Impact and a hundred more.
However, I would never, ever watch this movie or a lot of other movies like it. This is because I don't like movies with plots that insult my intelligence. Hell, I know people who _like_ dumb movies that hate this one because it was dumb. Movies like this are for people who have been lobotomized and find flashing lights endlessly entertaining.
Quite frankly, with few exceptions Hollywood hasn't had very many good writers for the past few years. This is why we keep seeing remakes of old movies and old stories. In many cases, these are _remakes_ of remakes. (I haven't seen Cruel Intentions because I've seen it before - it was called "Dangerous Liasons," which was a remake of an old French play.) And when you see competing movies with the same plot concept, (Impact and Armageddon being perfect examples) and one of the screenplays was obviously hastily written, it's pretty clear that some studios pay their corporate spies more than they pay their writers.
So yeah, I like movies. I even like a lot of movies. But there's a whole hell of a lot more movies that I despise. Thankfully, I can usually tell from the trailer those that are good and those that really stink. And it looks like I was right about this one.
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The task of being _able_ to search the entire world's printed matter (in each particular edition) for the past thousand years or so is in itself a massive undertaking. To be able to use such a database in a meaningful way would also be very very difficult.
But if we pull it off, I suppose we've just done a great deal of good for the Library of Congress, have we not? ;)
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Actually, I think I would like to be first in line to break the kneecaps of anyone stupid enough to start spamming me via pager/cellphone/pda. Isn't it bad enough to _have_ these appliances, and have them interrupt you at the worst time? Aren't telemarketers bad enough? I'm beginning to think that the Internet-plug-in-the-back-of-the-head idea is a bad one... imagine being CONSTANTLY bombarded with advertising while you're trying to think...
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Heh. Perhaps you just skipped right over the interview and posted without reading? This guy isn't pissed off because he might make less money. He's not too terribly concerned with making more money than he already does. (personally, if I were such an artist and had more money than I needed, I would focus on my art, because I don't _need_ to focus on making my rent.) He's pissed off because noone _asked_ him if he wanted to distribute his music on Napster. I know a number of erotic writers who really get pissed off when their stuff shows up on a porn site that charges money for their stuff. These writers aren't making _any_ money off of it, and they don't want to. They publish their stuff with the expressed intention that it be FREELY AVAILABLE. However, entirely too many people are willing to say "Hey, it's on the Internet, so it must be public domain, so I can start charging people money for it."
Don't deny that this attitude exists, because it's so rampant it's not funny. And Napster is most definitely making money off of this. And they expect to make a profit too, or you wouldn't see VC's pouring millions of dollars on them. If Napster had asked Metallica if they wanted their stuff to be distributed in this way, Metallica just might have agreed. But people didn't ask, they just started raping them.
And I also think it's funny the way people think about the music industry. If a guy in the Real World got a job doing the thing he really loved, people would look at him and say "hey, there's a really successful/lucky guy." But when a musician starts making money doing the thing he really loves instead of barely existing on a job at a fast-food joint, (or worse, struggling to make rent on the club circuit - most everyone would be really tempted to do "whatever it takes" under those circumstances.) then he's sold out to The Man and doesn't deserve the time of day. Gimme a break man.
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Apparently, the probability of a secret getting out is the square of the number of people who know that secret, no matter what kind of threats are hung over the heads of those trusted with that secret. This applies at such places as the CIA in the US, where secrets are very important and the consequences of giving them away are very nasty indeed. Why does Microsoft expect to keep this a secret when literally millions of people have easy access to it, most of whom have absolutely no reason whatsoever to not give it away (including contractual obligation, because the contract does not apply in their jurisdiction, or because they are underage)? It would appear to me that the only reason they even have the contract in the first place is so they can go around and bully lots of people in the open source movement.
Well, whatever. As Jack Webster once said, "Go ahead and sue me. I need the publicity!" Slashdot has certainly got a lot of that out of this.
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You mean besides getting fired? (The most feared penalty of social servants.) Try to get the HRDC to send information about you to government agency X someday.
"Please sign this consent form here, and this other form here, and present three pieces of ID, one of which has to be a driver's license, passport, or other picture ID."
If she doesn't make you go through this, consider getting her fired, as she's not doing her job. My impression from the HRDC is that they take your privacy seriously in this and many other ways. (For instance they mask all but the last three numbers of your social insurance number on any documentation they have.)
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But perhaps that isn't the issue here. :)
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Heh. It comes to me as a surprise that Microsoft cares about PR.They clearly do not. You would think that they believe the trial the DOJ has brought against them is a big PR nightmare, where they'd be losing customers left right and center, and that in order to avoid this, they would be scrambling to fix what they've been accused of doing wrong. You know, kind of like what IBM did when they were put under pressure from the DOJ for pretty much the same thing in the early 80's.
The problem is that we already know that about 60% of their customers hate them and would prefer never to do business with them again, if they had the choice. Microsoft knows this, and only sees the next two years or so of litigation by the DOJ as a ripe opportunity to rape their customers and "business partners" several more times, mocking the law as the gears of justice grind slowly to a decision against an industry where two years is longer than some of the most successful businesses are alive.
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